Metis (Greek): A Titan; first wife of Zeus. Administered a draught to Saturn, causing him to disgorge his children, whom he had eaten.
(Moon of Jupiter.)

Mysteries of Rennes-le-Château and the Prieure du Sion

by Steve Mizrach; edited by Morgana

Here are the basic outlines of the mystery of Rennes-le-Château. It was clear that Berenger Sauniere,
the parish priest of the small village during the late 19th and
early 20th century, had been receiving vast sums of money to refurbish
the local church and also to build many structures in the area,
such as his Tower of the Magdalene (Tour Magdala). Sauniere died in 1917, leaving the secret
of where he got his fabulous wealth to his housekeeper, Marie
Dernaud, who promised to reveal it on her deathbed -- but sadly
she had a stroke which left her paralyzed and unable to speak
before her death in 1953. Speculation was rife on the source of
the parish priest's money. Was it the lost treasure of the Templars
or the Cathars in the area? Might it have been buried Visigothic
gold? Or was he blackmailing the Church with some terrible secret? The
evidence that points to the last possibility is that Sauniere's
confession before his death was so shocking that the priest who
heard it denied him absolution and last rites.

The mystery is rendered greater
by a series of parchments found by the cleric in 1891, which contained
an easily discovered cipher. They were apparently written by his predecessor, Abbe Antoine Bigou, confessor to Marie d'Hautpoul, in 1781. (The same
cipher appears on her tombstone.) The parchments were, on the
face of it, Latin transcriptions of passages from the Gospels,
but they contained deeper mysteries. Sauniere also appears to
have left certain other "clues" in the highly unusual
redesign of his church and of the other structures in the area.
Hidden within those Latin parchments was a message in French:

"THIS TREASURE BELONGS TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION AND HE IS THERE DEAD."

Within the second parchment was an even stranger message:

SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION THAT POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE
KEY PEACE 681 BY THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE THIS DAEMON GUARDIAN AT MIDDAY BLUE APPLES.

A third cipher that appears, not in the documents, but at Shugborough
Hall's Shepherd Monument, is the curious "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M"
which has never been translated.

There is a famous painting by Poussin entitled "Les Bergers
D'Arcadie" (the Arcadian shepherds) which shows them around
a tomb containing the mysterious inscription "Et in Arcadia
Ego..." This tomb appears to be a virtual replica of one
not too dissimilar to it right outside of Rennes-le-Château. Three intrepid historians searched far
and away for others to help decipher the puzzle. Suffice to say,
Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh did a masterful job of "unearthing"
the Merovingian monarch Dagobert and tied together many mysteries
of history with a fantastic thesis that can be stated as thus:
Jesus and Mary Magdalene, legitimate nobility from the Judaic
Houses of Benjamin and David, married and sired heirs. Jesus did
not die on the cross but went either to England or India. (See Holy Blood, Holy Grail.)

The Magdalene's heirs married into the Visigoth families of
the time and gave birth to the sacred Merovingian ruling family.
The Visigoths of the area might have themselves been descended
from the House of Benjamin, which had fled to the Arcadia region
of Greece, and thence north into France, a thousand years earlier.
The Merovingians were not wiped out by the Carolingian usurpers,
and their lineage survives in some of the other royal families
of Europe; apparently the goal of the secret society entitled
the Prieure du Sion is a Merovingian restoration in France.
Nothing is as it seems with the Rennes mystery. But in the
hands of Leigh, Lincoln, and Baigent, it seems to encompass myriads
of others -- the dissolution of the Templars, the downfall of
the Cathars, the bizarre Rosicrucian manifesto, and other political
intrigues of French history. For it seems that Sion has a grievance
against the Church, who betrayed the Merovingian dynasty and crowned
its destroyers. If Sauniere was an agent of Sion, it might explain
why he was denied absolution.

Village of Mystery

Henri Boudet, the Abbe of Rennes-les-Bains (which neighbors
Rennes-le-Château) who wrote "The True Celtic Language and the
Cromlech at Rennes-les-Bains" may have been the "brains"
behind Sauniere. Lincoln thinks his book may offer the key to
the mystery. Boudet appears to argue in the book the silly
thesis that the Celts spoke Anglo-Saxon, and that it -- English,
in effect -- was the language which was spoken by Noah's sons before
the Tower of Babel. But David Wood and Henry Lincoln conclude
that the book may be averring something else -- that perhaps there
was a universal language before the Deluge: Number (or Measure).
And that the "key" to the "Cromlech" of Rennes-les-Bains
might be the old English mile. Lincoln believes that metrology
may play an important part in the Rennes-le-Château mystery. In
any case, other authors have noted that Boudet died under strange
circumstances, and that his book may have been sought out and
destroyed by the Bishop de Beausejour. Boudet, a linguistic scholar,
would have been a logical choice for Sauniere to approach with
his curious Latin parchments.

There are a few grisly murders that have taken place in the
area to add to the air of mystery. One was that of the old priest
Jean-Antoine-Maurice Gelis.
Toward the end of his life he became a paranoid hermit and recluse;
the only person he would admit to his presbytery was his niece,
to bring him food. Despite his absurd precautions, someone surprised
him on All Saints' Eve in 1897, bashed him with some fire tongs,
delivered four blows from an ax, and then reverently laid the
corpse on the ground with the hands crossed over the chest. Whoever
it was ransacked the room but took no money. A team of researchers
found three corpses in Sauniere's garden in 1956, all of them
shot. Were they World War II victims? Or something else? Noel
Corbu, who took care of Marie Denarnaud after her paralyzing stroke,
and who may have learned of something from her incoherent dying
whispers, was killed in a horrendous car crash in 1953 that some
suspect was not an accident. Sauniere's "heart attack"
in 1917 came on the suspicious date of January 17th (St. Anthony's
Day) and there are hints that the coffin had been ordered in advance.
A courier who carried the secret dossiers found by Sauniere, Fakhur
el Islam, was found dead on train tracks just outside of Melun,
East Germany, in 1967.

There are many more tantalizing things about Rennes-le-Château.
According to one researcher, it may be laid out in the shape of
a "Ship of the Dead" with a helmeted warrior borne to
sea. Yet another thinks that the Paris Meridian may have been
drawn so that it quite deliberately passes, ley-fashion, straight
through Rennes-le-Château, Arques, and Conques. Still others see
links between the site and Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland or Shugborough
Hall in Staffordshire, England. It is known that Sauniere took
his parchments to the Abbe Bieil, of the seminary of St. Sulpice,
which was where the Abbe's nephew Emile Hoffet launched the Catholic
Modernist rebellion which would eventually land Modernist works
on the Vatican's "banned" list. Saint Sulpice's feast day, January 17th, is the date
of Sauniere's sudden stroke. He was the bishop of Bourges, on
the Paris Meridian, and in his seminary is an obelisk with a copper
line marking the exact point of the alignment.

Codes, Ciphers, and Scripts

Perhaps the most enigmatic elements mentioned in the text as
decoded by Lionel Fanthorpe is the phrase "Blue
Apples at Noon."
The code in the parchments is only decipherable through the use
of the "knight's tour" -- a logic puzzle wherein one "jumps"
a knight to every square on a chess board, once and only once.
It is a puzzle which has only one solution -- as does the code,
clearly. But the use of chessboard imagery at Rennes-le-Château
is striking.

Clearly, to some degree, the puzzle lies in the layout of the
redesign of Sauniere's church, and his other building projects.
The village parish church had been dedicated to the Magdalene
in 1059; during the restoration, he found the mysterious parchment
(supposedly) in a hollow Visigothic pillar underneath the altar
stone. A statue of the demon Asmodeus guards near the door.
The plaques depicting the Stations of the Cross contain bizarre
inconsistencies. One shows a child swathed in Scottish plaid.
Another has Pontius Pilate wearing a veil. St. Joseph and Mary
are each depicted holding a Christ child, as if to allude
to the old legend that Christ had a twin. Other statues are of
rather esoteric saints in unusual postures: St. Roch displays
his wounded thigh (like the Grail King Anfortas), St. Anthony
the Hermit holds a closed book, St. Germaine releases a bevy of
roses from her apron, and the Magdalene is shown holding a vase.
Sauniere's library and study, the Tour Magdala, is placed precariously
over a precipitous chasm at a place where one would be foolish to build
such a permanent structure, unless...

The Once and Future King

Up until recently, little was known about
the Merovingian kings, as they inhabited that historical epoch
derided as the Dark Ages. The founder of the royal
line, Merovech, was said to be of two fathers -- his mother, already
pregnant by King Chlodio, was seduced while swimming in the ocean
by a Quinotaur, whatever that was, and Merovech was formed somehow
by the commingling of Frankish blood and that of the mysterious
aquatic creature. Like the Nazoreans of old, the Merovingian monarchs
never cut their hair and bore a distinctive birthmark -- said
to be a red cross over the shoulder blades. Their robes were fringed
with tassels which were said to carry magical curative powers.
They were known as occult adepts, and in one Merovingian tomb
was found such items as a golden bull's head, a crystal ball,
and several golden miniature bees. Strangely, many skulls
of these monarchs appear to have been ritually incised; i.e.,
trepanned.

The Sicambrians, ancestors of the Franks, were known as the
"people of the Bear" for their worship of the bear-goddess
Arduina. The word "Arcadia" comes from Arkas, patron god
of that area of Greece, the son of the nymph Callisto, sister
of the huntress Artemis. Callisto's constellation is also known
to many as Ursa Major, the Great Bear. The name "Arthur"
comes from the Celtic arth, related to "Ursus" -- namely, "bear." In legend,
the Merovingians were said to be descended from the Trojans, and
Homer reports that Troy was founded by a colony of Arcadians.
The "Prieure documents" claim that the Arcadians were descended
from Benjamites driven out of Palestine by their fellow Israelites
for idolatry. "Arcadia" was also known as the source
of the River Alphaeus, the "underground stream" which
figures so prominently in Coleridge's poetry and in esoteric literature.
The Merovingians were "sacred kings" who reigned but
did not rule, leaving the secular governing function to chancellors
known as the Mayors of the Palace. It was one of these Mayors,
Pepin the Fat, who founded the dynasty that came to supplant them
-- the Carolingians.

One of the great Merovingian kings, Clovis, struck a deal
with the newly nascent Roman church. He would subdue their enemies,
the Arian Visigoths and the pagan Lombards, in return for baptism
into the faith and recognition of his right to rule a new Roman
empire as "Novus Constantinus." Yet one of his descendants,
Dagobert II, was murdered by a lance pierced through his eye (or
poison poured in the ear -- accounts vary) at the orders of Pepin.
The church endorsed the assassination, flatly betrayed its pact
with Clovis, and in turn recognized the family of usurpers as
legitimate, culminating with the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy
Roman Emperor. It was thought that the Merovingian lineage was
extinguished; in any case it was excised from the history books.
But there is some evidence that Dagobert's son, Siegebert IV,
survived and that a Merovingian principality continued to be
ruled in Septimania by Guillem de Gellone, a descendant -- and
ancestor -- of Godfroi de Bouillon. If the Prieure documents are
to be believed, the Merovingian lineage persists to this day,
largely due to efforts to preserve it through intermarriage. The
significance of such alliances is the key. Dagobert married the
daughter of the Visigothic Count of Razes, giving his descendants
hereditary title to the lands surrounding Rennes-le-Château.

The Arch-Cabal

The Prieure du Notre Dame du Sion, or Priory of Zion, is said
to be the cabal behind many of the events that occurred at Rennes-le-Château.
According to the Prieure's own documents, its history is long
and convoluted. Its earliest roots are in some sort of Hermetic
or Gnostic society led by a man named Ormus. This individual is
said to have reconciled paganism and Christianity. The story of
Sion only comes into focus in the Middle Ages. In 1070, a group
of monks from Calabria, Italy, led by one Prince Ursus, founded
the Abbey of Orval in France near Stenay, in the Ardennes. These
monks are said to have formed the basis for the Order de Sion,
into which they were "folded" in 1099 by Godfroi de
Bouillion. For about one hundred years, the Order of the Temple
(Knights Templar) and Sion were apparently unified under one leadership,
though they are said to have separated at the "cutting of
the elm" at Gisors in 1188. (The Templar order was then destroyed
by King Phillipe Le Bel of France, in 1307.) Sion appears to have
been at the nexus of two French antimonarchical movements, the
Compagnie du St.-Sacrament of the 17th century (acting on behalf
on the Guise-Lorraine families) and the Fronde of the 18th,
as well as behind an attempt to make the Hapsburgs emperors of all Europe
in the 19th -- the Hieron du Val d'Or. It appears that there are
vast connections between Sion and numerous sociocultural strata
in European thought -- Roscicrucianism, Freemasonry, Arthurian
and Grail legends, "Arcadianism," Catharism, chivalry,
etc.

Yet this mysterious secret society brought itself to light
in 1956 and is listed with the French directory of organizations
under the subtitle "Chivalry of Catholic Rules and Institutions
of the Independent and Traditionalist Union," which in French
abbreviates to CIRCUIT -- the name of the
magazine distributed internally among members. Depending on what
statutes one considers, Sion either has 9,841 members in nine
grades, or 1,093 members in seven, with the supreme member, the
"Nautonnier" or Grand Master of the Order being, till
1963, Jean Cocteau. While it is believed the head has been Pierre
Plantard de St.-Clair up until recent times, he claims to have
left that post in 1984, so it is not clear who runs the organization
at this time. But whoever he is, he has had illustrious predecessors: Jacques DeMolay, Leonardo de Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Claude
Debussy, among others! Plantard, in any case, seems to have enjoyed
the ear of many influential persons in contemporary French politics
-- deGaulle, Marcel Lefebvre, Francois Ducaud-Bourget, Andre Malraux,
and Alain Poher, and others, many of whom appear to know him
from his efforts with the Resistance during the Vichy occupation.
Despite its registry, however, the organization remains untraceable,
its given address and number leading to dead ends -- which might
lead one to wonder why the government never bothered to verify
the information.

Some interesting things have come to light about the Prieure
recently. One is that the Swiss Grand Lodge Alpina (GLA), the
highest body of Swiss Freemasonry (akin to the Grand Lodge of
England), may have been the recruiting body for the Prieure. But
the GLA is also said by some to be the meeting place of the "Gnomes
of Zurich" who are said to be the Power Elite of Swiss bankers
and international financiers. The GLA is said by David Yallop to
be the body which controlled the P2 Masonic Lodge in Italy. (P2
controlled the Italian secret police in the 1970s, took money
from the CIA and KGB, may have had a hand in the kidnapping
of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, had 900 agents in other branches
of the Italian government and the highest positions of the
Vatican, bombed a train station and tried to blame it on the Communists,
used the Vatican Bank to launder Mafia drug money, fomented fascist
coups in South America, and is most likely linked to the arch-conservative
Knights of Malta and Opus Dei in the Vatican.) P2's Lucio Gelli
may have had a role in the death of John Paul I, and perhaps even the assassination attempt on John Paul II.

One of the most interesting people to write about the Prieure
may be Michael Lamy. He claims that Jules Verne was a member of
both the Prieure and the Illuminati. Further, he maintains that
the Prieure's politics must be understood as "Orleanist,"
which he describes as "aristocratic, anarchistic, and Nietzchean."
Perhaps it all becomes most clear when Lamy reveals to the reader
that the true secret of the village of Rennes-le-Château
is that the extinct volcano Mount Bugarach leads down into the
hollow earth to a realm of supermen. Ean Begg feels
it is connected with many of the Black Virgin sites all over Europe.
Certainly, if the organization's full name is the Prieure de Notre
Dame du Sion, and if it is site of Orval is connected to the worship
of the bear-goddess Arduina, venerated by the Sicambrian Franks
of the area and their Merovingian kings, then this may be the
case. There are hints, of course, that "Notre Dame"
is not the mother of Jesus, but Mary of Bethany AKA "Magdalene" a princess of the tribe of Benjamin, which is itself notorious
for an outbreak of goddess-idolatry in the period of the Judges.
That Mary may also be the one also known to the Gypsies of the
south of France as one of the three "Maries-de-la-Mer,"
whom they call "Sarah the Egyptian," the sun-burnt one.

Sailing and Grailing Across the Atlantic

The most bizarre chapter in the story of Rennes-le-Château
may have to do with the Money Pit mystery on Oak Island just off
Nova Scotia. According to Michael Bradley, some of the keepers
of the Grail may have come to the New World long before Columbus.
(Key proof: acorns do not float, he notes.) He believes that some
of the Templars may have fled to Canada after the dissolution
of their order, carrying the Grail. (The Money Pit has more often
been associated with pirates' buried treasure, but as many know,
the "Jolly Roger" flag's skull-and-crossbones icon has
long been associated with Masonic and Templar legend.) The so-called
Venetian "Zeno Map" of the 15th century
shows a knight with
a sword standing where Nova Scotia is. (The Sinclairs of Scotland
are "hereditary lords of Rosslyn Chapel" and are said to
be descended from the Scots Guards, a clique loyal to the Stuart
dynasty, which in turn are thought to have contained converted
members of the Templar Order who fought with Robert the Bruce
at Bannockburn, and to have provided the basis of Freemasonry.)
In the Money Pit on Oak Island, a mysterious stone inscription
was found: "FORTY FEET BELOW TWO MILLION POUNDS ARE BURIED."
Every company that has tried to locate this treasure has failed.

Along with the supposed visits of Prince Madoc of Wales and
St. Brendan of Ireland, Prince Henry the Navigator's trip to the
New World with the Zeno brothers makes it one of numerous European
pre-Columbian voyages. The Zeno map, along with those culled by
Viking travelers, may have even helped Columbus make his way across
the Atlantic. Recently, a UFO "contactee"
in Canada who calls himself only "Guardian" speculated
wildly about some "Brotherhood of the Grail" being operative
there for centuries. Geographically speaking, there are in fact
two Oak Islands, surrounding a central river, at the confluence
of which is a mysterious ruin, which appears to be a fortress
or old castle. It does appear that there may be strands connecting
Rennes-le-Château and the New World. Ultimately, the Rosicrucian ideas behind
the American experiment (as documented by Manly Palmer Hall) may
have deeper "Arcadian" roots. Bradley hints, but does
not come out and say, that what is beneath the Money Pit may be
the Grail.

It is not the only weird trail in the Rennes mystery. One researcher
insists that the inventor Barnes Wallis was one of the most recent
Grand Masters of Sion. Yet another feels it is worth pursuing
the origins of the Cajun people of Louisiana. Others have even found connections to the so-called
"Baconian" theory, which suggests that Sir Francis Bacon
authored Shakespeare's plays. Bacon's works suggest a Rosicrucian
experiment taking place in the New World. Fanthorpe seems to
believe that ultimately Rennes-le-Château may be a "doorway
unto the invisible" -- a gateway to other dimensions, through
the Emerald Tablet, which he speculates may have been a tesseract
(3-dimensional representation of a 4-dimensional figure).

The
Visigothic kingdom of Rhedae was in the area, and the Visigoths are known
to have seized at least some portion of the treasure of the Temple
(taken by the Romans during the Jewish Revolt of 70 CE) when they
sacked Rome in the 5th century CE. Could that treasure have been
the Ark of the Covenant, concealed at Rennes? Alternatively, the
Copper Scroll of the Dead Sea sect (the Qumran Essenes) suggested
some of the Temple treasure was hidden before the Roman invasion.
Could the "Nestorian" Christians of the area have concealed
the Ark and given it to the Templars for safekeeping? Or could
it have been hidden in Solomon's Stables underneath the Mosque of
Omar, where the Templars are known to have excavated? Might the
Ark have been the item "smuggled" out by two Cathars
under highly dangerous circumstances right before their brethren
fell at Montsegur? The Ark may not have been an extraterrestrial
"power source," as some authors have claimed, but if
it is the possession of Sion, it is an explosive secret, to say
the least. Sion has claimed that they have items "which will
be returned to the government of Israel, when the time is right."
Is the Grail in fact the Ark under a new guise?